Coloraddy getcha some rocket launchers!

[Woodsy]

By John Ruwitch

BEIJING (Reuters) - The anti-aircraft battery and rocket launcher at Xiangshan aim straight into a flight path that cuts over the northwestern corner of the Chinese capital.

As Li Ruqing proudly shows off the weaponry, he casts an eye across the courtyard at a padlocked shed where chemical-tipped shells and missiles are stacked at the ready.

"There is a 30 percent chance we use them tonight," he says.

Li, finger on the trigger, is no madman. Nor does he run some suburban gunnery range for China's air defenses. He's a "weather modifier" -- his weapons disperse chemicals into the sky and his targets are waterlogged clouds.

Cloud seeding, as Li's work is termed, is increasingly common in China, where a chronic drought grips the North and hailstones ruin countless acres of crops nationwide every year.

"Our main job," he says with the focus of a seasoned field commander, "is the prevention of hail ... If there is hail heading for Beijing, this is the last line of defense."

Li commands three installations like Xiangshan, or Fragant Hills, in northwestern Beijing where, when the clouds are thick and when he's sure there are no planes overhead, he opens fire on the sky with special rockets to make it rain.

In the past, Chinese emperors sacrificed oxen and sheep to draw rains from the heavens. Today, Chinese statistics show that cloud seeding, which can also be done by aircraft, may be somewhat more effective.

This year, some city planners are talking about training their rain guns on another enemy -- the energy shortage that is hobbling China as its electricity-producing capacity struggles to keep up with the booming economy.

The idea: Make it rain during the dog days of summer to bring down the temperature and hopefully lower electricity consumption. Shanghai plans to give it a try, and the idea has been broached in Beijing but not yet pursued.

The technique was tried last year in the southern province of Jiangxi, but the results were not publicized, said Chen Zhiyu, head of the national weather modification office.

"They say rainfall was really increased and the results were not bad," Chen said.

CLEAR BENEFITS

Even without precise statistics, the fact that cloud seeding is being talked about as a way to ease the electricity shortage is a testament to the high appraisal of the technique in China.

Seeding has been used for decades, but it has grown quickly since the 1990s. China suffered its worst drought in more than a decade in 2001.

From 1995 to 2003, China spent 2.2 billion yuan ($266 million) on cloud seeding nationwide and now there are 35,275 people in the business of making it rain, China Meteorological Administration statistics show.

Years of drought in northern China have even sparked reports that some towns were complaining of others stealing their rain by seeding clouds as they passed. Li laughed off the idea, saying clouds held more than enough rain to go around.



In 2003 alone, the state spent about 413 million yuan to attack clouds, using 30 planes, 3,800 rockets and 6,900 artillery shells, statistics showed.

The administration says cloud seeding added more than 7.4 trillion cubic feet of precipitation from 1995 to 2003.

Zhang Qiang, deputy director general of the Beijing Weather Modification Office, said cloud seeding had increased rainfall by about 12.5 percent in China's capital.

In Beijing, in drought for the sixth year running, weather modification officials have started using rain-making techniques to try to fill up dwindling reservoirs.

The new interest in using cloud seeding to help cool cities also illustrates just how bad the energy shortage is. Officials expect a shortfall of 40,000 megawatts this year, enough to power 40 million households.

Officials in power-short Shanghai say the city will start cloud seeding, perhaps as early as this week. Li, who has about 25 years of experience making clouds rain, said it just might work.

"I would think it is useful, but I've never seen anyone directly do the statistics," he said. "For sure, when the amount of rain increases, the temperature on the ground could go down."

But there were some things even a veteran cloud shooter could not control.

"Man-made rain cannot reduce the amount of sunshine," he said. "And sunshine guarantees that the ground temperature goes up." ($1 = 8.28 yuan)

[Crinkle]

dood, we don't need no stinking cloud seeding. Friday afternoon 1 hour of rain = 4 inches no joke. The creek rose 8 feet by my house, all kinds of flooding in the area, then it rained some more. Lots of erosion damage. Winter time is a different story. Wonder how far off (west) they would have to cloud seed for summit co to get some results.

paging red baron.

[truth]

CLOUD SEEDING IN COLORADO:
Roll of the Dice or Act of Faith?


Henry Lansford
Information Officer
National Center for Atmospheric Research
Boulder, Colorado


Summary of a talk presented on August 15, 1977, at an environmental luncheon
sponsored by the Denver Water Board and the Rocky Mountain Center on Environment

Last February, after signing a bill establishing a state-supported emergency cloud-seeding program to get more snow in the Colorado Rockies during the remainder of the disastrous "Winter of '77," Governor Richard Lamm referred to the effort as "a roll of the dice."

The atmospheric scientists who had advised the Governor to support the project viewed it somewhat more positively, as a sort of technological act of faith based on scientific evidence that cloud seeding had produced additional snowfall in earlier weather-modification research programs.

Opponents of the cloud seeding saw it as an unwise expenditure of public funds on a scientifically questionable and environmentally reckless venture that might distract public attention from the need for water conservation and other responses to the drought that was afflicting the state.

The buck stopped on Dick Lamm's desk as far as last winter's cloud seeding was concerned, and I'm not here today to try to second-guess his decision to support the project. But I think it's very important to keep several facts in mind about short-term operational cloud-seeding projects such as this one.

First, when such a project is concluded, there is no way to measure with scientific certainty how much additional precipitation was actually produced by the cloud seeding.

Second, most of the scientific evidence for the efficacy of cloud seeding in augmenting precipitation is statistical rather than physical. That is, it says that in field experiments, more precipitation fell from a large number of seeded clouds than from a large number of unseeded clouds, but it doesn't tell us exactly what happened inside individual clouds.

Third, even if the most optimistic scientific estimates of its effectiveness are accepted, cloud seeding is no panacea for a severe and widespread drought like the one that currently is afflicting much of the western United States.

If these caveats are accepted, a cloud-seeding program may be a perfectly rational response to a drought emergency, as long as it is regarded as one tool in a comprehensive program of drought response rather than as a miraculous technological fix for drought. I believe that the Colorado General Assembly acted in this spirit when, along with legislation establishing a number of other drought-related programs, it passed House Bill 1722, which established a state-supported cloud-seeding program to be conducted in the mountains this winter. This bill provides $300,000 from the state general fund, with the stipulation that every state dollar must be matched by fifty cents from other sources such as municipalities or water conservation districts. Cloud seeding is expected to begin around November 1.

So the state's decision makers either have faith in the evidence that cloud seeding can stimulate more snowfall or they regard the drought as a serious enough emergency to warrant a little crap shooting. In deciding to support cloud seeding, they acted on the advice of atmospheric scientists who regarded evidence from previous weather-modification research projects as convincing.

But what about the public--the people of Colorado who are affected by the drought and who will pay the bill for the cloud-seeding project? Does it matter what they think about cloud seeding, and is their any way for them to express their opinions?

I believe that there's no doubt that the ultimate decisions about the operational use of weather-modification technology will be made by the public rather than by politicians or scientists. I am not alone in this opinion--consider this statement from a report published in 1971 by the federal Interdepartmental Committee on Atmospheric Sciences:

What the public thinks about weather modification, rather than what the scientists know about it, will play the dominant role in the future of this science. The most expertly developed technology, whether it is for augmenting water or for suppressing damaging weather phenomena, will find only limited application in the absence of a string public demand.

Recent history provides a number of examples of weather-modification efforts that have been terminated because of public opposition. Only last year, an extensive state-supported weather-modification program in South Dakota died when the state legislature, influenced by public controversy and opposition that had developed, decided not to appropriate funds to continue the program. In Colorado, a private cloud-seeding operation supported by Moravian barley growers in the San Luis Valley was denied a state weather-modification permit because a large number of residents of the valley opposed the program.

I have a number of reasons for believing that the public will make the final decisions about the operational use of cloud seeding in Colorado. One of them is very simple. During almost any six-month period that you want to choose, something unusual will happen as far as Colorado's weather is concerned. Last summer, when no cloud seeding was being done, we had the Big Thompson flood. Last winter, when clouds were being seeded in the mountains, we had a period of extremely high wind that brought severe blizzard conditions to the plains. Although the scientists say that there's no way that the seeding in the mountains could have caused the blizzard on the plains, some people are convinced that it did.

My point is this: if cloud seeding is being done when unusual bad weather occurs, some people will insist that the cloud seeding caused the bad weather. When this happens, there is a good chance that the situation will escalate into a loud and bitter public controversy. And when that happens, the large majority of the public that has had no strong opinion about cloud seeding may be forced to make up its collective mind. By then, it will be very difficult for the scientists and decision makers to explain their decision to seed clouds, because they will be on the defensive. If a good many people who aren't committed to either side of the controversy don't have some understanding of how cloud seeding works and why the decision was made to use it, then the project is likely to be in deep trouble.

In some cases, I believe that public opposition to weather-modification programs has developed for the wrong reasons. It would be a serious mistake to reject cloud seeding simply because most people don't understand what it's all about. On the other hand, I believe that it would be an equally serious mistake to continue a cloud-seeding program that does not have at least tacit support from the people who are paying the bill--Colorado's taxpayers, in the case of the state-sponsored program.

However, to support the program intelligently, the people need to know a good deal about it, including the risks and uncertainties that are involved as well as the potential benefits. It is the responsibility of the scientists, technologists and managers who are running the program, as well as the people in the mass communication media who are reporting on it, to do their best to inform the public accurately and completely about cloud seeding, and particularly about the current state-supported cloud seeding.

If cloud seeding were a sure thing--that is, if the seeders could guarantee that a certain number of dollars invested in a cloud-seeding program would produce so many inches of extra snow over a particular area--then the decision would be pretty straightforward. But instead, the taxpayers are being asked to risk their dollars on a proposition that involves considerable uncertainty but that could provide significant benefits as long as the region is afflicted by drought.

How good is the evidence that, under certain conditions, cloud seeding can produce additional precipitation from mountain snowstorms? According to some sources, it's pretty good. The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation has just released the results of two years of detailed analytical studies of five winter cloud-seeding research projects in the Rocky Mountains and the Sierra Nevada. The study considered four general types of snow clouds that differed from one another in terms of temperature, water content, turbulence and wind conditions. The analysis indicated increases in snowfall ranging from 18 to 52 percent from seeding three types of clouds, and deceases of 54 percent from the fourth type. However, the study didn't establish how frequently each cloud type occurs in various mountain ranges or how much water each type actually contributes to the spring and summer runoff from the melting snowpack.

Regardless of how much faith you have in the credibility of these research results, applying them to operational cloud-seeding programs still involves some gambling. As the ability to get more snowfall by cloud seeding clearly depends on the presence of certain kinds of clouds that are susceptible to seeding, the processes that determine whether or not the right clouds will be present still have to be regarded as a "roll of the dice" in terms of present scientific knowledge.

[homerjay]

There was an article about Vail doing it a few years ago. I believe it was subsidized by the state.

And I'd like to think they have more reliable systems and results than they did in 1977.

[m1e448]

All i know is that the lake effect we get out east is almost like cloud seeding

[INDY GS]

In the past, Chinese emperors sacrificed oxen and sheep to draw rains from the heavens. Today, Chinese statistics show that cloud seeding, which can also be done by aircraft, may be somewhat more effective.

Lake effect is nothing like cloud seeding, the lakes build clouds. Now if they warmed the lakes that would be kinda like cloud seeding.

[m1e448]

Lake effect is nothing like cloud seeding, the lakes build clouds. Now if they warmed the lakes that would be kinda like cloud seeding.

sorry for being an ignorant bastard. All that text started to hurt my eyes

[hev]

I believe the city of denver started funding cloud seeding last winter...theres a thread about it on here i think(but it might be pmag):

http://www.durangotelegraph.com/04-0...n_exchange.htm
-----------------------------------------------------------
Effects of cloud seeding studied

DENVER, Colo. After several years of drought, ski areas, big cities and water districts of Colorado are spending more than $1 million this winter to seed clouds in hopes of inducing more snow. But how well does it work?

That's what a $100,000 study being conducted this winter will attempt to more definitively answer. In the study, funded by the federal government, researchers for Colorado State University will track storms daily, comparing the predicted and actual snowfall accumulations in areas targeted for more snow with clouds seeded by silver iodide particles. These areas will be compared with control areas, where there is no seeding.

A National Research Council study of weather modification programs takes a dim view of cloud seeding generally, but less so of winter cloud seeding. There are, says the agency, in a report issued in October, "strong suggestions of positive seeding effects in winter cloud systems occurring over mountainous terrain."

The report states that the most compelling evidence that cloud seeding works comes from experiments during the 1960s at Climax, a molybdenum mine located near the Copper Mountain, Breckenridge and Vail. Although scientists initially over-reported the amount of extra snow that fell, later studies still came up with a "possible increase in precipitation of about 10 percent."

Denver also commissioned two studies last winter intended to determine whether the $400,000 it is spending to seed clouds is producing more snow in its water collection areas, located in the Winter Park and Summit County areas

[INDY GS]

no need to apologize, I was just pointing out a fact. I have often thought that if they could warm the lakes we could get more snow. But what the hell would we do with more precip here we hav had record precip all year long.